To
view photo album of 128 pictures mainly taken by Betty Nolan, go to www.ritzpix.com and sign in under Lewis’
email name of lewis_nolan@yahoo.com
(password ln9876 with lower case initials). Under “My Albums,” activate “Rome
and Mediterranean Enchantment” album and play as a Slideshow with longest
offered delay in seconds.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 –
In Rome, Italy

Betty
and I arose at the luxurious St. Regis Hotel in Central Rome about 7:30 a.m.,
feeling fairly refreshed after a comfortable night’s sleep and about as ready
as we could be for seeing the sights of this Eternal City. After all, I had
read most of Julius Caesar’s Book “Gallic Wars” as a second-year Latin student
of barely competent scholarship as a junior at Sacramento (CA) High School.

Moreover,
I had been a fan of gladiator movies and other films about Rome in its glory
years of 2,000 years ago. So look out Rome, here come another fan – this one
nearly 66 years old who is a retired pharmaceutical and newspaper executive
from Memphis.

For breakfast, I had
luckily saved the leavings of last night’s dinner sandwich at the hotel and
enjoyed them in our spacious hotel room along with a small bag of Fritos chips
brought from home. As is her custom, Betty deferred on an early morning meal.

Our local tour guide and
driver – Franco Lattughi – met us on schedule in the lobby just before 9 a.m.
He is a multi-lingual professional of about 55 whom we hooked up with through
his regular clients, Gulliver’s Travel agency in Memphis. Franco has lived in Rome for many years and is an expert on the history and
culture of what has been known for centuries as the “EternalCity.”

We spent much of the
morning seeing the ruins of ancient Rome with Franco driving us around in his
late model, four-door Toyota. He gave us much relaxed commentary with
fascinating information about Rome’s two millennia as a leading city of the
world. We stopped here and there to take pictures. Our guide has spent time in
the U.S. and commands excellent English. He was a wonderful resource for us in
every respect and worth every penny of the roughly 45 Euros per hour plus
expenses for admission fees to attractions.

Between Franco and our
guidebooks, we learned that the Coliseum is ancient Rome’s most famous monument and is visited by
many thousands of tourists every day. It was started in AD 80 with a program of
games and shows that lasted 100 days. On opening day along, an estimated 5,000
wild animals perished in the arena. Beneath the blood-soaked dirt is a maze of
underground passages and quarters for animals and gladiators kept out of sight
until “show time” for the bloodthirsty Romans. In its heyday, the Coliseum had
an ingenious system of awnings to provide shade.

We also learned a lot about
Rome’s Circus Maximus (a mile-long, dirt and turf race course for chariots in
front of what are now the palace ruins), the Roman Forum (where the ashes of
Julius Caesar are among burials and monuments) and assorted temples to the
Roman and Greek Gods like Hercules and well-preserved ruins like Constantine’s Arch.

Constantine is remembered
as the first Roman Emperor to endorse Christianity and the one who moved the
seat of power from Rome to what later was known as Constantinople, which was renamed
Istanbul centuries later. The towering brick and marble arch honoring him was
built in the 4th-century BC; reliefs depict his victory over
Maxentius in AD 312. He had a vision of a Cross in Heaven and heard the words:
“In this sign thou shalt conquer,” which foretold his triumph and led to his
decree that Christianity was lawful and would be tolerated throughout the
empire.

During one of our stops, I
was surprised to see that a Bay Leaf tree growing up a modest hillside
bordering the Coliseum was nearly as big as the mighty oak trees in our Memphis
yard. We saw that many of Rome’s
side streets are paved with cobblestones these many centuries after their
construction. I was interested to learn that the Roman engineers – among the
greatest the world has ever seen – precisely laid out the width of their pre-auto
highways so that Roman chariots built to a standard width of 4.5 feet could
pass side by side.

Parts of the historic roads
serving Rome and fanning out in all directions survive, as do sections of the Aqueducts
that brought fresh water to the city. The flattened stones inset into the roads seem
to pose a hazard for today’s fashionably-dressed and svelte young woman wearing
high heels who walk about the sidewalks and dodge motorists when crossing
streets bereft of lane markings and pedestrian crossing lights.

Here and there are small
fountains by sidewalks in tourist areas that spout fresh water so pure that
Franco stopped from time to time for a drink. He assured us of the fountain
water’s safety. But Betty and I demurred in favor of bottled beverages as our
defense against stomach troubles suffered from drinking local water on other
trips.

Rome presented me with the
worst traffic snarls I’d seen since my fairly frequent business trips to
Manhattan before my 1996 retirement from Schering-Plough. For drivers, it’s
everyman for himself. Franco instructed us to “Do as the Romans do” and stride
purposefully into traffic while gesturing motorists to stop. That system seems
to work. Miraculously, the drivers really do stop to allow pedestrians to
thread their way across extremely busy streets. I didn’t see a single
pedestrian crossing light anywhere in Rome that we visited. I heard few horns
tooting, but it was common to see stopped drivers waving their hands
Italian-style and muttering to themselves.

Drivers in Rome play by
their own rules and park anywhere. I saw nary a policeman ticketing the many
cars parked in places that would be illegal back in America. Double parking is
common, which must pose an extreme inconvenience to those whose egress is
blocked.

Franco dropped us off at
the main entrance to the Vatican in Central Rome about 10:30 a.m. so he could
find a place to park within a few blocks. It was somewhat rainy on this
morning. It looked like at least another 100,000 tourists had the same bright
idea as we did to alter our touring plans in order to be inside during the day.

I gather that the centrally
located Vatican is one of the most visited spots in Rome, with tourists coming
from around the world to pay homage to the Pope and the seat of the Roman
Catholic Church. However, Franco told us that estimates are that 60 percent of
the visitors to the Vatican – who pay admission charges of 14 Euros (nearly $20
in U.S. dollars) on days like this – are non-Catholic.

Our trip planning included
buying the “Eyewitness Travel Guide to Italy” on the recommendation of our
travel agent, Erin Bobbitt de Padilla. The 720-page book is a voluminous source
of photos and factual information about Italy’s trove of surefire tourist
attractions. We also used a well-worn edition of Fodor’s Guide to Europe.

The highpoint of our
touring in and around Rome was spending a half
day at the Vatican.
In all, it is roughly the size of a large university campus in the U.S.
It is impossible to see everything in a day, so we deferred to Franco’s
experience and spent most of our visit in St. Peter’s Basilica and walking
through hundreds of yards of corridors of art galleries. I was amazed at how
large the Vatican complex is, even after reading the great book, “The Agony and
Ecstasy” about Michelangelo's five-year project to paint the incredibly
beautiful ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and seeing various movies and TV shows
set there over the years.

There were two things
absolutely at the top of my favorites list at the Vatican. They were the
Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica, site of so much public display
orchestrated by the Church. But I must
say that the enormous amounts of public space available for touring combined
with the limited time we had for viewing kept us from seeing but a fraction of
what’s available.

Both the Sistine Chapel and
St. Peter’s are rich with history and the
advancement of humankind. An oddity that draws a lot of visitors is a large,
bronze statue of St. Peter. His toes are bright shining from the wear of
literally hundreds of kisses and touches by visitors every day.

We saw a sprinkling of
priests and nuns wearing their full battle dress. They were likely drawn from
around the world. They patiently walked on the tours with everyday visitors.

The VaticanMuseum
is one of the greatest storehouses in the world of ancient and medieval
artwork. Due to our time limitations and the recommendation of our local guide,
we passed on touring the free-standing Vatican Museums for Egyptian Art and
Etruscan (pre-Roman) Art. I had the feeling I’ve had before in the vaunted
Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC – it would take literally weeks to see
everything on display and a huge percentage of objects actually owned are
hidden away in storage or out on loan to other museums and religious institutions.

Like with other first-time
visitors to the magnificent collection at the Vatican and its unparalleled
history in Western Civilization, I was mildly overcome at times by the emotion
of seeing so much excellence and celebration of Mankind’s best and brightest
art and other great work. I just wish that everybody could share in seeing
firsthand the history-shaking, material outcomes of the rise of religion and
thought in the Western World.

For me, it was at once a
reaffirmation of my beliefs that God truly loves us, that we are all God’s
children and that we all belong to a global community of humble humanity. That
message is hammered home by the monstrous mosaics, great tapestries and
fabulous artwork on a huge scale on display everywhere in the Vatican.

Sadly, this day of crowds
of tourists driven inside the Vatican by the rain pelting Rome resulted in a
slow-walking mass of people shuffling along, shoulder-to-shoulder down the
corridors with richly decorated walls and ceilings. The humanity was packed so
tight that it was quite difficult to pass from one side of the 20-foot wide
corridors to get a closer look at the great number of art works along the way.

Unfortunately due to the
crowds, l was not able to carry out a mission given me by a member of my Sunday
school class back home. He had asked me to inspect paintings of assorted Vatican leaders and royal figures from the 14th
Century for signs of swollen throats. My friend, Dr. Lester Van Middlesworth, a
world-renowned scientific researcher on the faculty of the University of
Tennessee Medical School, was seeking confirmation of the presence of the
reported to him evidence of enlarged goiter imbalance conditions of the time due
to the unmet need for iodine in their diets, depicted in the paintings either
by the reality or fashion of the day.

As a footnote, a group of
Van’s students found the existence of similar conditions in an isolated tribe
of natives on the Caribbean Island of Haiti earlier in the year. Their
discovery – celebrated by publication of the results of their work in a
scientific journal – resulted in a small amount of correcting iodine medication
given those so afflicted. As for me, I’ll always regret that the heavy crowds
in the Vatican on my day of visit prevented me from furthering Van’s his
research. He and others suspect they may have been a possible goiter condition
in Italy’s ruling class half a millennia ago.

By the end of our guided
tour led by the oh-so-knowledgeable Franco, my legs were so tired that they
felt like they were on fire from all the walking up and down steps and across
acres of unyielding, Travertine marble floors.

On his suggestion, we ate
lunch at a small café across the street from our St.RegisHotel. I was surprised that the food was served
cold and was on the pricey side, possibly the results proprietors paying little
attention to the return possibilities of unending streams of visiting tourists
– sort of like a hot dog stand in a national park.

After a welcome nap in our
luxurious room at the hotel, Betty and I paid premium prices for another light
but excellent dinner. It was graciously served on heavy silver by Marciano, who
was clad in a tuxedo and just as expert and polite as his colleague Alessandro
from the previous night. I had a vegetarian club sandwich served with French
fries and local beer. Betty enjoyed a tasty ham and cheese sandwich. With tip
plus a bottle of Tonic Water for me (the quinine helps prevent night leg
cramps), the cost for the meal and beverages served in the plush hotel lobby
came to just over $100 in dollars.